Humans don’t disengage and let the machines handle the situation but machines do it all the time. Do the machines disengage at tricky situations or straight lines?
Case A: Non Tesla Human drives 999 easy miles and 1 hard mile
Case B: Autopilot drives 999 easy miles, and human drives 1 hard mile
If the effect size of the hard mile is so large that its skewing the statistics, you would expect the Telsa human driver to have a horrendous per mile accident rate relative to the non tesla human driver. What's most likely is that the accidents following a human handoff get correctly allocated to the Autopilot and the effect size being described is not actually that significant.
A Tesla can relatively safely cover traffic like divided or controlled access highways. That's a very narrow slice of all possible driving situations and not one responsible for most accidents.
Is that the only reason? I suspect that many (most) student drivers are also in general more alert, drive slower, and follow each rule/guideline to an extreme. If they don’t the instructor will probably end the lesson and remove a dangerous driver of the road.
Also the oldest Tesla with AP is less than 10 years old (with an average of 3-4 years given the sales trends). The average age of cars on the street in the US is over 12 years old. An accident statistic that looks at reasonably new, premium cars against everything else won't paint the correct picture.
Tesla publishes their own data for the safety of autopilot, which I presume is based on their own analysis of accident records. Is this same detailed information available to other groups (insurers, NIST, etc)? Or do they just calculate an aggregate "Tesla mile per accident" rate that is a blend of the great autopilot rate and horrible human rate?
I'm not trying to be facetious here. I have no idea if this data is available to any groups other than Tesla themselves. And if so, do they publish those numbers?
The human rate for tesla driven miles tends to be ~4x better than the other brands' average. To precisely answer this question you would want to see both a comparable brand's humans' performance; and probably the split of humans who used autopilot and humans who don't ever use autopilot. We don't have that, but in my personal opinion there's enough evidence to suggest it's probably not a grand conspiracy. I'm of the opinion that autopilot being ballpark on par with other drivers is more than enough to reduce accidents substantially, at scale.
Humans don’t crash at every tricky situation but Tesla claims that humans are horrible drivers and their cars gives the control to the humans when when something happens.
If your premise is to be believed as a significant effect, you must also accept that this outcome should be visible in the data